In his seminal work, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone cites legal change as part of the evidence for his claim that a new sort of family marked the eighteenth century. Property law especially is pointed to as proof that the patriarchal family had given way to what has come to be known as the affective family. It was, of course, natural to seek a basis in law for a theory of family development. Law at any time tells us much about family life. It is certainly fundamental to changes that are said to mark the affective family. Because of an increase in affect (or in another word, love) it is claimed that the new family type saw an increase in the independence of children, and an increase in the status and property of women. Indeed, recognizing the importance of law, Stone has found each of his three stages in family history to be paralleled in property law. The discussion of law does not occupy much space; but it occupies strategic space. Law is the first, or almost the first, thing discussed in each of the stages of the family. The legal arrangements governing property are not just a part of the evidence for the theory; they are a most important part. They can be seen to provide the framework, the hard structure, on which the theory is built. “The hardest evidence”—Stone's words—for the great change he sees in the eighteenth century he finds in law.

Between the 1880s and 1914, British liberalism underwent a significant transformation. During this period, liberalism was redefined by liberal intellectuals so as to be more explicitly an ideology of social reform. At the same time, from 1906-1914 Liberal governments enacted a radically new social welfare policy. Both of these phenomena were the product of a growing awareness on the part of most Liberals that their party was critically dependent upon the votes of working men for electoral success. Following the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and the launching of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign in 1903, the Liberals were faced with an overt challenge from both the left and the right to their claim to be the party of the working man. The articulation of a new liberalism—both as ideology and as policy—was central to the Liberal response to this challenge.

If, however, the Liberal party were to persuade working-class voters that it remained the best political instrument for defending their interests and promoting their needs, the evidence of a transformed liberalism could not be limited to the ideology of intellectuals and the policy of the parliamentary party. The language and behavior of the party activists in the constituencies had to reflect a similar transformation. These were the men who represented liberalism to the local voter. At the same time, these were the men upon whom the national party depended for the unstinting work that was crucial to electoral success. This Liberal rank-and-file was dominated by middle-class Nonconformists. They shared with Liberals a belief in individual liberty and an abhorrence of privilege. Their political agenda—disestablishment of the Anglican church and an end to its privileged position in the education system, temperance reform, the application of Christian principles to foreign policy—reflected these concerns, and after 1886 it increasingly was identified with the policy of the Liberal party. To what degree, then, did the new liberalism affect them?